Long ago (10 years?) it was reported (rumored?) that the NSA (who have their own fabs) uses microcircuits encapsulated in packages that destroy the chip (chemically? thermochemically?) if any attempt is made to pop the lid to examine it.
Commercial fabs used to pot the chip in a material that could only be dissolved by acids that will also eat the device.
2 cable-TV outlets (in the wrong place)
2 phone lines (in the wrong place)
1 Sprint BBD line (in the wrong place)
1 Symphony Wireless LAN (always in the right place)
Lots of long, fat, crumpled, ugly wires running along my baseboards.
If I had a new house to build, I would install multiple multi-port wallplates per room, each one including:
TV RF or S-video outlet (depending on room);
RJ-11 phone (DirecTV and TiVo, e.g., need this);
RJ-45 Cat5e data line (for control);
shielded AC lines run from a UPS/surge-protector/filter (which separates the entertainment/data power from appliance/lighting power).
There would be extra RJ-45 Cat5e outlets in certain locations for Gigabit Ethernet, digital audio transport, etc. FDDI or an optical audio medium are a possibility.
Every room, plus several locations outside, would be laced with audio cable, to allow renovations that involve moving speakers (16ga. is fine; Monster Cable is for suckers).
Floors would have fat conduit channels between the panels, to allow the occasional mid-room run.
Each wall would have an unused horizontal and vertical riser.
I figure the utility closet should have a full-height rack with nothing but patchboards.
And I'd keep the wireless ethernet, for a hundred good reasons. But only if there's something to be done about the broken security and worsening interference.
You can engineer the organisms to eat almost anything.
Spam.
I want them to eat spam.
E-mail spam.
Get on it.
--Blair
P.S. There was a book I read about 25 years ago about an old man who filled his grandson's squirtgun with moldy grape juice and used it to dissolve 9-track database tapes at some MegaCorp's computer center, in order to get revenge on them. I think it was a Donald Westlake book. Web searches are turning up nil.
What's the point of putting the cards on hooks? Paste those fuckers down. Dead things aren't going anywhere. Put the live ones on hooks, so you can move them to the dead board and paste them down. (Half-wit artists are my pet peeve; talk about people doomed to failure...the only artistic value here is in that irony).
"And of course no office would be complete without a water cooler, which is where everyone gathers to get the latest gossip." Huh? Who the fuck ever "gathers around the water cooler?" These are people who communicated with their peers via online communities. If they gathered around anything it was a foosball table. If they wanted water they dribbled it into their Mentor Graphics mugs from desktop water-crocks, or pushed the button for it on the free-coke machine. "Water cooler" is just a figure of speech, and an inept one at that. Concreting it as art is either lame or ignorant.
"I was laid off from this company which is rapidly downsizing. They are throwing people off the plane like human cargo, so they can stay afloat." Nice mixed metaphor, Zack. Performance art. Display the stupidity that led to the debacle. This part I liked. Too bad it wasn't supposed to be part of the show.
"Rather profound". Anyone who sees any of this saran wrap as "profound" probably thinks omphaloskepsis actually means studying your navel until it reveals the secrets of the universe.
Basically, what the article tells us is that San Francisco is filling up with idiot losers who are shell-shocked by the experience of living a negative possibility they should have considered before gambling their futures on it, and who will react in puerile ways to anyone who is empathizing with them if only by rubbing their faces in their failures. And the wannabe artists and art-crits who love them and don't want to work too hard at it. Sounds like an abusive codependent relationship. I hope they're happy together. I'm gonna go get a burger.
Remember that the Halting problem has to do with the infinitely general case. Invoking it to justify buggy specific cases is lazy.
The problem is evident: Java is prone to getting into infinite loops that were not intended by the program designer.
Much more so than any other piece of software I've run more than once in the past few years.
Most coders have an intuitive understanding of the flow of their process, and do not create infinite loops, even if Turing says they're never 100% sure. Something about Java keeps this intuition from working.
Most likely it has to do with race conditions conflated with external events and undisciplined state-machine design. Which, when you look at it, is the Java programming model. It's also the Windows, Mac, and X programming models. Java should be revised with the goal of obviating this high-probability trap.
My laptop has a CPU fan that only cycles on when the CPU gets too hot.
It gets too hot and cycles the fan on whenever a java applet goes bugfuck in my browser and spins in the background, even after I close the browser. Happens about once a week, and more often if the offending websites increase my interest for a while.
So "99.9%" might be a little understated. Most computers probably have similar problems with crappy applets. It may affect a particular user maybe only 0.1% of the time, but it will hit nearly every user at least once over a long enough span of time.
Intel's half-speed hack might prevent a disaster. What's really needed is for someone to fix or denigrate Java so that applets never crash in runing states.
The beginning of the FSM at Berkeley was righteous.
But it quickly turned into a faddish, party-like, power-mad atmosphere.
Mario Savio and the people he led were protesting a legitimate problem caused by the Berkeley administration.
By the time it was being copied on campuses across America, it had become the "make up an excuse to go protest, get high, get laid, get your jollies" movement. A combination of hero worship, beatnik ethics, and youthful experimentation run amok.
It might have been fun, but it wasn't very constructive.
But then, maybe we should bring it back, because college students now riot when the women's basketball team loses a national championship game. They're obviously not being distracted well enough by chemicals, politics, and the acquisition of knowledge, to keep them from being mobbish and violent for completely stupid reasons...
The difference is, with SlashDot you're learning to be more informative and less annoying; to use the brains you have. You can modulate your style and choices from post to post.
With AmIHotOrNot you get one shot, then your self-esteem goes to whichever extreme. Or you get expensive surgery, and maybe take a second shot. Or you kill yourself.
Here's a handy reference card, for those who don't quite get it:
Oh, there could easily be 10 billion embedded CPUs. Maybe even 20. But not 99. Not 16 for every homo sapiens on this mostly backward-ass rural bumfuck of a planet. No way, San Jose.
Real-time is "within one second". Schedulable is "within 400 million clocks".
The question comes when you ask "how many seconds is 400 million clocks?"
or
"Can I re-point this buffer descriptor between subsequent 100Base-FX packet-received interrupts on a Motorola PowerQUICC 8260 CPM?" Then your schedulable had better be real-time.
Think internal vs. external events. Throwing the baseball to yourself on the run vs. throwing it to Rickey Henderson on the run. You don't need to know how fast you're going. You do need to know how fast Rickey's going.
Embedded does not imply schedulable, and schedulable does not imply real-time.
Embedded means you normally don't use a general-purpose human interface on it (your PDA don't count, it's just a small personal computer).
Schedulable (what most people call real-time, so much so that it's a linguistic shift I'm willing to tolerate) means it will perform its requirement before a deadline.
Real-time means it is schedulable using the date and time-of-day.
I now leave you to the flame war that will ensue. If it digresses enough, we can talk about editors, political wings, and whether the lack of a salary cap is ruining baseball or making it greater.
And according to the federal age-discrimination law someone else posted, the forced-retirement exemption only applies to upper-level executives who have golden parachutes.
Rank-and-file engineers, or that old codger in the machine shop who knows more about aluminum than you know about your mom, are safe from the "policy".
Intel's board is a lump of play-doh, being added to as stuff gets stuck in it.
And how hard is the job of a director, anyway. You only have to show up once a year, if that. The rest you can get your lackeys to do.
The point here isn't Moore's workload. It's his desire to add heft to a page of the Intel policy manual, one that Moore himself might have written, or certainly renewed, back when he was CEO.
Three-ring binders rule the lives of corporate droids. Never forget that.
A 2.4mbps wireless pipe replaces your need for cable modem, DSL, etc., etc. and increases your max BW by a minimum of 2x. Sprint already sells SpeedChoice--er, Sprint Broadband Direct, but only in a couple of markets. If they can put this new thing on all their poles, it's fucking brilliant.
Until you read further down the article and see them promising just 140kbps per channel. Which you can already get out of Ricochet. That should be the sticking point. Not the fact that your Palm saturates at 100kbps (I'm making that up). Increased bandwidth can always be rerouted to something in your home.
A few dozen years ago, the libraries got together and decided the same thing about books.
So they started putting everything on paper onto microfilm. Microfilm is small (cheaper to store), durable, and readable as long as you have light, lenses, and the language.
But documents on microfilm don't have the utility of documents on electronic media. You have to search them by static index, you have to access them by tedious mechanical scrolling, you can't reorganize them in situ, and you can't compress them further, so you end up needing to find a new medium.
The same thing will happen with all digital media. As long as there are people finding new ways to store data, they will find better ones. And as long as there are people finding new ways to process data, they will find reasons that they can't process the data on the older storage media.
Symbolically recorded information is only a few thousand years old. It's hubris to believe we've come close to running out of ways to improve it, that we have exceeded our capacity to obsolete what we imagine is the be-all and end-all of epistemology.
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3a70c1b007e0. ht m
Each time Aldridge re-registers, he agrees to abide by the User Agreement. Aldridge then proceeds to violate the User Agreement by posting lewd and obnoxious messages.
It's pretty clear that he does not agree to abide by the "User Agreement". He merely clicks a button near a statement that he either doesn't read or reads and disagrees with. The button might even say something like "I Agree". Silly button.
Slashdot Mirror
Prior art (maybe):
Long ago (10 years?) it was reported (rumored?) that the NSA (who have their own fabs) uses microcircuits encapsulated in packages that destroy the chip (chemically? thermochemically?) if any attempt is made to pop the lid to examine it.
Commercial fabs used to pot the chip in a material that could only be dissolved by acids that will also eat the device.
--Blair
What I got, in 2000 s.f.:
2 cable-TV outlets (in the wrong place)
2 phone lines (in the wrong place)
1 Sprint BBD line (in the wrong place)
1 Symphony Wireless LAN (always in the right place)
Lots of long, fat, crumpled, ugly wires running along my baseboards.
If I had a new house to build, I would install multiple multi-port wallplates per room, each one including:
TV RF or S-video outlet (depending on room);
RJ-11 phone (DirecTV and TiVo, e.g., need this);
RJ-45 Cat5e data line (for control);
shielded AC lines run from a UPS/surge-protector/filter (which separates the entertainment/data power from appliance/lighting power).
There would be extra RJ-45 Cat5e outlets in certain locations for Gigabit Ethernet, digital audio transport, etc. FDDI or an optical audio medium are a possibility.
Every room, plus several locations outside, would be laced with audio cable, to allow renovations that involve moving speakers (16ga. is fine; Monster Cable is for suckers).
Floors would have fat conduit channels between the panels, to allow the occasional mid-room run.
Each wall would have an unused horizontal and vertical riser.
I figure the utility closet should have a full-height rack with nothing but patchboards.
And I'd keep the wireless ethernet, for a hundred good reasons. But only if there's something to be done about the broken security and worsening interference.
--Blair
You can engineer the organisms to eat almost anything.
Spam.
I want them to eat spam.
E-mail spam.
Get on it.
--Blair
P.S. There was a book I read about 25 years ago about an old man who filled his grandson's squirtgun with moldy grape juice and used it to dissolve 9-track database tapes at some MegaCorp's computer center, in order to get revenge on them. I think it was a Donald Westlake book. Web searches are turning up nil.
voodoolady cursed: To mourn a valueless economy with an artless art project.
Ten words. Nailed point.
Foo. And I wasted all my moderator points already this morning. Someone mod that one toward 5 for me.
--Blair
Sad, bad, loser art about sad, bad losers.
Let me try to make a list, pickiest first:
What's the point of putting the cards on hooks? Paste those fuckers down. Dead things aren't going anywhere. Put the live ones on hooks, so you can move them to the dead board and paste them down. (Half-wit artists are my pet peeve; talk about people doomed to failure...the only artistic value here is in that irony).
"And of course no office would be complete without a water cooler, which is where everyone gathers to get the latest gossip." Huh? Who the fuck ever "gathers around the water cooler?" These are people who communicated with their peers via online communities. If they gathered around anything it was a foosball table. If they wanted water they dribbled it into their Mentor Graphics mugs from desktop water-crocks, or pushed the button for it on the free-coke machine. "Water cooler" is just a figure of speech, and an inept one at that. Concreting it as art is either lame or ignorant.
"I was laid off from this company which is rapidly downsizing. They are throwing people off the plane like human cargo, so they can stay afloat." Nice mixed metaphor, Zack. Performance art. Display the stupidity that led to the debacle. This part I liked. Too bad it wasn't supposed to be part of the show.
"Rather profound". Anyone who sees any of this saran wrap as "profound" probably thinks omphaloskepsis actually means studying your navel until it reveals the secrets of the universe.
Basically, what the article tells us is that San Francisco is filling up with idiot losers who are shell-shocked by the experience of living a negative possibility they should have considered before gambling their futures on it, and who will react in puerile ways to anyone who is empathizing with them if only by rubbing their faces in their failures. And the wannabe artists and art-crits who love them and don't want to work too hard at it. Sounds like an abusive codependent relationship. I hope they're happy together. I'm gonna go get a burger.
--Blair
Remember that the Halting problem has to do with the infinitely general case. Invoking it to justify buggy specific cases is lazy.
The problem is evident: Java is prone to getting into infinite loops that were not intended by the program designer.
Much more so than any other piece of software I've run more than once in the past few years.
Most coders have an intuitive understanding of the flow of their process, and do not create infinite loops, even if Turing says they're never 100% sure. Something about Java keeps this intuition from working.
Most likely it has to do with race conditions conflated with external events and undisciplined state-machine design. Which, when you look at it, is the Java programming model. It's also the Windows, Mac, and X programming models. Java should be revised with the goal of obviating this high-probability trap.
--Blair
>> Boycotting companies is one solution, but how does one boycott the government.
>
> MOVE
You misspelled "VOTE".
My laptop has a CPU fan that only cycles on when the CPU gets too hot.
It gets too hot and cycles the fan on whenever a java applet goes bugfuck in my browser and spins in the background, even after I close the browser. Happens about once a week, and more often if the offending websites increase my interest for a while.
So "99.9%" might be a little understated. Most computers probably have similar problems with crappy applets. It may affect a particular user maybe only 0.1% of the time, but it will hit nearly every user at least once over a long enough span of time.
Intel's half-speed hack might prevent a disaster. What's really needed is for someone to fix or denigrate Java so that applets never crash in runing states.
--Blair
someone goes to Purdue...
I ruled out Purdue when they recruited me to be a Teaching Assistant...while I was in high school...
--Blair
The beginning of the FSM at Berkeley was righteous.
But it quickly turned into a faddish, party-like, power-mad atmosphere.
Mario Savio and the people he led were protesting a legitimate problem caused by the Berkeley administration.
By the time it was being copied on campuses across America, it had become the "make up an excuse to go protest, get high, get laid, get your jollies" movement. A combination of hero worship, beatnik ethics, and youthful experimentation run amok.
It might have been fun, but it wasn't very constructive.
But then, maybe we should bring it back, because college students now riot when the women's basketball team loses a national championship game. They're obviously not being distracted well enough by chemicals, politics, and the acquisition of knowledge, to keep them from being mobbish and violent for completely stupid reasons...
--Blair
"Four bored in O-hi-o."
The difference is, with SlashDot you're learning to be more informative and less annoying; to use the brains you have. You can modulate your style and choices from post to post.
With AmIHotOrNot you get one shot, then your self-esteem goes to whichever extreme. Or you get expensive surgery, and maybe take a second shot. Or you kill yourself.
Here's a handy reference card, for those who don't quite get it:
Slashdot: Gooood.
AmIHotOrNot: Baaaad.
--Blair
"Read. Learn. Evolve."
Oh, there could easily be 10 billion embedded CPUs. Maybe even 20. But not 99. Not 16 for every homo sapiens on this mostly backward-ass rural bumfuck of a planet. No way, San Jose.
--Blair
Ah, the flame war begins.
No.
Real-time is "within one second". Schedulable is "within 400 million clocks".
The question comes when you ask "how many seconds is 400 million clocks?"
or
"Can I re-point this buffer descriptor between subsequent 100Base-FX packet-received interrupts on a Motorola PowerQUICC 8260 CPM?" Then your schedulable had better be real-time.
Think internal vs. external events. Throwing the baseball to yourself on the run vs. throwing it to Rickey Henderson on the run. You don't need to know how fast you're going. You do need to know how fast Rickey's going.
The difference between the two is everything.
--Blair
You'd be surprised what the market penetration of Visual C++ is, and how much that will determine the choice of embedded OS.
--Blair
Um...
Embedded does not imply schedulable, and schedulable does not imply real-time.
Embedded means you normally don't use a general-purpose human interface on it (your PDA don't count, it's just a small personal computer).
Schedulable (what most people call real-time, so much so that it's a linguistic shift I'm willing to tolerate) means it will perform its requirement before a deadline.
Real-time means it is schedulable using the date and time-of-day.
I now leave you to the flame war that will ensue. If it digresses enough, we can talk about editors, political wings, and whether the lack of a salary cap is ruining baseball or making it greater.
--Blair
There are nearly a billion PCs in the world.
If that is only 1% of the CPUs, then there must be 99 billion embedded CPUs.
If that's the case, why isn't the SOX doing better?
--Blair
'nuff sed
And according to the federal age-discrimination law someone else posted, the forced-retirement exemption only applies to upper-level executives who have golden parachutes.
Rank-and-file engineers, or that old codger in the machine shop who knows more about aluminum than you know about your mom, are safe from the "policy".
--Blair
Moore used to be Chairman.
Then he gave that job to Andy Grove.
Intel's board is a lump of play-doh, being added to as stuff gets stuck in it.
And how hard is the job of a director, anyway. You only have to show up once a year, if that. The rest you can get your lackeys to do.
The point here isn't Moore's workload. It's his desire to add heft to a page of the Intel policy manual, one that Moore himself might have written, or certainly renewed, back when he was CEO.
Three-ring binders rule the lives of corporate droids. Never forget that.
--Blair
Read the article to the bottom. You're half right. They're flogging "10x better than 14.4"...
--Blair
"9.6kb! 128x better than 75 baud!"
WRONG!
A 2.4mbps wireless pipe replaces your need for cable modem, DSL, etc., etc. and increases your max BW by a minimum of 2x. Sprint already sells SpeedChoice--er, Sprint Broadband Direct, but only in a couple of markets. If they can put this new thing on all their poles, it's fucking brilliant.
Until you read further down the article and see them promising just 140kbps per channel. Which you can already get out of Ricochet. That should be the sticking point. Not the fact that your Palm saturates at 100kbps (I'm making that up). Increased bandwidth can always be rerouted to something in your home.
It's just too bad Napster didn't live to see it.
--Blair
DNS wouldn't be all that hard to replace. It's just a matter of propagating the upgrade.
ICANN's power is being usurped by alternative TLD systems that are doing just that.
So ICANN is going to be nobody's new world government. Though I bet they love being referred to that way.
--Blair
If it's linuxen it runs on, I know where I can find a few million of those...
--Blair
A few dozen years ago, the libraries got together and decided the same thing about books.
So they started putting everything on paper onto microfilm. Microfilm is small (cheaper to store), durable, and readable as long as you have light, lenses, and the language.
But documents on microfilm don't have the utility of documents on electronic media. You have to search them by static index, you have to access them by tedious mechanical scrolling, you can't reorganize them in situ, and you can't compress them further, so you end up needing to find a new medium.
The same thing will happen with all digital media. As long as there are people finding new ways to store data, they will find better ones. And as long as there are people finding new ways to process data, they will find reasons that they can't process the data on the older storage media.
Symbolically recorded information is only a few thousand years old. It's hubris to believe we've come close to running out of ways to improve it, that we have exceeded our capacity to obsolete what we imagine is the be-all and end-all of epistemology.
--Blair
Semantic problem:
. ht m
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3a70c1b007e0
Each time Aldridge re-registers, he agrees to abide by the User Agreement. Aldridge then proceeds to violate the User Agreement by posting lewd and obnoxious messages.
It's pretty clear that he does not agree to abide by the "User Agreement". He merely clicks a button near a statement that he either doesn't read or reads and disagrees with. The button might even say something like "I Agree". Silly button.
--Blair